Benazir killing's eyewitness gagged

WASHINGTON (Daily Times): A Canadian newspaper report claims that Ishtiaq Hussain Shah, the deputy superintendent of police who was alongside former prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s vehicle when she died, has been gagged with no one allowed to visit him in the Rawalpindi hospitial where he is recovering from the injuries he suffered in the December 27 blast.

According to the Globe and Mail, there was no security cordon around Benazir as she left Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi where she was killed. The doctors at the hospital, who on the night of her death said she died of bullet wounds to the head and neck, mysteriously changed their story the next day.

Security arrangements: The report states, “To many in Pakistan, it all smacks of state complicity in the assassination. To others, it points, at the very least, to a concerted attempt to hide the extent of the security failure.” The PPP leader’s “own private security arrangements seemed poor and chaotic. Armoured cars are not typically fitted with sunroofs – Ms Bhutto’s vehicle was reportedly modified against all safety advice. After her death, her husband made the startling revelation that she was guarded by men he had met in prison. ‘Both the state and the internal security of the Pakistan People’s Party failed miserably,’ according to Masood Sharif Khattak, a retired former head of the Intelligence Bureau, Pakistan’s top civilian intelligence agency. ‘But state responsibility (for security) stands first and foremost.’ According to that suppressed report on the assassination, the authenticity of which could not be verified, a pistol made by the Chinese company Norinco was recovered from the scene, with lot No 311-90. An MUV-2 triggering mechanism for the bomb was also found, similar to the ones used in 15 previous suicide bombings, and with the same lot number and factory code.”

Another report in the Seattle Times notes, “The first report is from Ishtiaq Hussain Shah of the Rawalpindi police, who witnessed the assassination and said that as Benazir’s car headed onto Rawalpindi’s Liaquat Road after an election rally on December 27, a crowd appeared from nowhere and stopped the motorcade, shouting slogans of her Pakistan People’s Party and waving party banners. Benazir, apparently thinking she was greeting her supporters, emerged through the sunroof of the bullet-proof car to wave. ‘I don’t know who they were or from where they came … They just appeared on the road.’ But 10 feet from where he was standing, a man in the crowd wearing a jacket and sunglasses raised his arm and shot at the former prime minister. ‘I jumped to overpower him,’ Shah said later. ‘A mighty explosion took place soon afterwards.’ Shah, recuperating from injuries suffered in the attack, is in a Rawalpindi military hospital, guarded by agents of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate.”